TTMA vs Vapi vs Retell vs Bland

Per-minute rates only tell part of the story. With cloud voice platforms, the voice endpoint is all you get. You still need to build and host the backend: memory, CRM, tools, business logic. That's where the real cost hides.

TTMA's per-minute rate covers the voice AI, telephony, and the full OpenClaw agent brain. With Vapi, the advertised $0.05/min is just the start - add STT, LLM, TTS, and your own backend, and a 10-minute call costs $1.30 - $3.00. With TTMA, what you see is what you pay.

TTMA runs on your own server. The voice gateway binary installs in minutes on any Linux VPS, Mac, or Raspberry Pi, next to your OpenClaw agent, so the agent's brain, memory, tools, and CRM data never leave your machine. Live audio flows from the phone carrier, through a Cloudflare tunnel, to your gateway, and from there to Google's speech-to-speech model; it does not pass through our servers. What we store by default is the call recording and the transcript, so they show up in your dashboard, and each is a switch you control. Prefer not to run a box? We can host the gateway for you.

Vapi and Retell are cloud-only. Every call routes through their infrastructure. Your audio, transcripts, and customer data live on their servers. Vapi charges $1,000/month extra for HIPAA compliance. Retell includes HIPAA but still processes your data.

Bland offers self-hosting but only on enterprise plans with dedicated GPU infrastructure. TTMA runs on a $5/month VPS.

Most voice AI platforms use a three-step pipeline: speech-to-text (STT), then a language model (LLM), then text-to-speech (TTS). Each step adds latency and loses nuance.

TTMA uses native speech-to-speech AI - a direct audio-in, audio-out model. There is no transcription step between the caller's voice and the AI's response. The model hears the caller directly and speaks back directly. This means:

• Sub-second response time (no STT + LLM + TTS serial pipeline)
• Natural barge-in (the model detects interruption at the audio level)
• Better understanding of tone, emphasis, and conversational cues
• 30+ languages without configuring separate STT/TTS providers

With cloud platforms, your customers' voices are processed on third-party servers. You trust the vendor with call recordings, transcripts, and personally identifiable information.

With TTMA self-hosted, the agent, its memory, and your CRM data stay on your server, and the voice model only hears the call. The only call content we hold is what you let us hold: recordings and transcripts are on by default so they appear in your dashboard, and each is a switch you can turn off. You can bring your own Gemini key so Google bills you directly and we never hold the key, and you can have any call's data deleted on request. This matters for regulated industries, sensitive conversations, and any business that takes customer privacy seriously.

This is the fundamental difference. With Vapi, Retell, or Bland, you create a voice bot from scratch. You define prompts, wire up tools, build a backend for memory and context. The voice bot is a separate thing from the rest of your business automation.

With TTMA, you give your existing OpenClaw agent a phone number. The same agent that manages your email, runs your CRM, handles your Telegram messages, and automates your workflows - now picks up the phone and makes calls too. Same brain, same memory, same skills, same tools. Just with a voice.

Your agent already has:

• Persistent memory - it remembers who called, what was discussed, and what to follow up on
• Skills - CRM, email, calendar, knowledge base, and any custom skill you've installed
• Custom tools - any REST API you've connected is available on voice calls too
• Identity and playbook - your agent's personality and business rules carry over to voice

You don't rebuild your agent for voice. You just give it a phone.